Sit back and soak it all in, everyone. The man who has won three of the last four national championships; who recruits better than anyone on the planet; who has the Tide machine as lethal as it has ever been, is standing on the soapbox at the Southeastern Conference’s annual spring meeting and firing away.

He's calling out his colleagues in the SEC. He's embarrassing a rival in the Big Ten.

He's pining for the days of playing an NFL-type schedule where a team can lose seven games and still win it all.

All of this because the SEC is debating moving to a nine-game league schedule, a proposal Saban is completely invested in—and one that a league source told Sporting News could be complete by 2015.

The league’s presidents, athletic directors and coaches will spend all week here discussing the proposal and could announce a specific plan by Thursday or Friday. The likely move, according to one source: extend the current schedule one more season through 2014, then move to nine games possibly as early as 2015.

While the argument over a nine-game conference schedule has become the talk of the college football offseason throughout the major conferences, this isn’t something new for Saban. He spoke out about his desire for a nine-game schedule last season, but has since ratcheted up the rhetoric.

While many in the SEC are holding on like grim death to eight games—Vanderbilt’s James Franklin said, “We’ve won seven straight national titles, why change what doesn’t need to be fixed?”—Saban is pushing harder than ever to bring the SEC in line with the rest of college football.

The Big 12 and Pac-12 currently play nine-game conference schedules, and the Big Ten will move to a nine-game schedule in 2016. The ACC has an annual five-game scheduling agreement with Notre Dame beginning in 2014—which will lead to what some are calling 8 1/2 conference games.

And there sits the SEC: the conference with the new billion-dollar television network desperate for quality inventory (see: football games); the conference behind the push for having the “four best teams” in the new College Football Playoff, with no limit on the number of teams per conference; and the only major conference playing through the path of least resistance.

“If you look at it through a straw and how it affects you and you’re self-absorbed about it, then you’re not going to be for (nine games),” Saban said. “I’m trying to look at it from 1,000 feet.”

If you closed your eyes and drifted back 15 years, you’d swear Saban was Steve Spurrier, the outspoken coach who had just turned the SEC sideways with his bravado and his high-flying teams at Florida. Spurrier once took shots at then-SEC commissioner Roy Kramer because of the lack of a national playoff—with Kramer sitting at the back of the room.

This time, Saban took a not-so-subtle jab at current SEC commissioner Mike Slive, who has brought the league to new heights with his leadership—specifically, by negotiating television contracts that will bring the conference unthinkable millions.

“The biggest thing we all need to do in some of these decisions we’re making about who we play and what we do is, what about the fans?” Saban said. “One of these days, they’re going to quit coming to the games because they’re going to stay at home and watch it on TV. Everybody’s going to say, ‘Why don’t you come to the games? Well, if you’d play somebody good, then we’d come to the games.’”

Even when the argument didn’t fit the narrative Tuesday, Saban still turned it into an opinion that gigged another. When told playing nine league games could lessen the SEC’s chances of playing in the College Football Playoff, and that the Tide wouldn’t have played in last year’s national championship game if Ohio State were eligible, the response was simple and to the point: The more SEC games you play, the better you look for the new selection committee.

The SEC, Saban pointed out, had six teams ranked in the top 10 of the final BCS poll.

“How well would (Ohio State, coached by longtime foe Urban Meyer) have done had they played the six teams that were ranked in the top 10?” Saban said. “Would they beat them all? Would they beat three of them? I don’t know.”

Alabama played three of the six teams, and went 2-1 (beat LSU and Georgia; lost to Texas A&M). Only two SEC teams played as many as four of the six: Florida went 3-1 (wins over LSU, Texas A&M and South Carolina; loss to Georgia) and Missouri was 0-4 (losses to Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama).

Like any of those numbers matter to the most powerful man in college football. In Saban’s perfect world, the five major conferences would each play 10 games against each other: nine conference games and one non-conference game.

But that’s too simple. That doesn’t take into account teams that are trying to get better. Or the former elite teams trying to bounce back. Or the old coach in a make-or-break season, or the new coach trying to break through.

“Everybody has their reasons,” Saban said. “They’re just thinking about ‘How many games can I win? Can I get bowl qualified? How many tough teams do I have to play?’ instead of looking at what’s best for the league.”